"The Belt carries young black athletes out of black America and introduces them
to a world with very few African-Americans, a world of white agents, real estate
brokers, bank presidents, trustees, and lawyers. The fact that so many of the
athletes' closest advisers are not African-American means that they’re never
around black models of leadership, a situation that undermines their own ability
to become leaders, rather than pampered, passive followers.’
’Excerpted from Chapter 7, The Conveyor Belt

Once
upon a time, prominent African-American athletes were inclined to leverage their
fame as a means of confronting racism. From Paul Robeson to Jackie
Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Jim Brown to Arthur Ashe to Olympic medal-winners
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, there is an abundant legacy of commitment to the
black community.

But judging by today's socially-unenlightened crop of sports icons,
one might suspect that rich history of activism and advocating for the
underclass to be more fairy tale than fact. For the once-widespread dedication
to hard-fought, collective advancement has been all but abandoned by the current
generation of superstars, at least according to William C. Rhoden, author of
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black
Athlete.

The tone of today's ballplayer is perhaps typified by the NBA's
Grant Hill who acknowledges that, ’When you're making $200,000 every two weeks,
it's hard to get angry about anything.’ Rhoden, a sportswriter for The New York
Times since 1983, concedes that most pros now make more money in one season than
his childhood heroes could accumulate over the course of their entire careers.
But he also argues that these financial rewards ought to translate into an even
more effective advocacy bloc for African-American advancement.

Yet instead, we have entered the ago of the apolitical mega-star,
carefully-packaged products such as Michael Jordan who Rhoden says went to great
lengths to cultivate a non-threatening, ever-neutral public image. The author
points out that Jordan was a ferocious competitor of unparalleled drive on the
court and in the corporate world but not ’when it came to confronting racism.’

Insights such as this is what makes Forty Million Dollar Slaves a priceless and
prophetic discourse on the path of blacks in sports, dividing its time between
African-American history and the present-day dilemma where we find
individualism, commercialism, materialism and blas' attitudes celebrated at the
expense of any concern about a black agenda.

Also of interest is how the
book, posthumously, gives credence to most of the notions which cost the late
Jimmy the Greek his job when he related anecdotes about ante bellum plantation
owners breeding slaves for muscularity. Now we learn that blacks did dominate
the field back then whether in horseracing as the country's first jockeys or in
track as sprinters at events staged to entertain white spectators.

Perhaps most significantly, it asks some very meaningful questions about
franchise ownership, pointing out that the integration of baseball
simultaneously signaled the demise of the black-owned Negro League. For while
Brooklyn Dodger owner Branch Rickey has invariably been hailed for having signed
Jackie Robinson, here, he is blamed for helping keep black competitors out of
the big leagues, rationalizing preserving a white monopoly with ’There is no
Negro League as far as I'm concerned.’

Overall, Forty Million Dollar Slaves still offers an optimistic message since
thousands of black athletes are now blessed with the means to make major
statements about the way their industry is run, provided they remember their
roots and somehow develop the wherewithal and inclination to get involved.
Nonetheless, such a salvation is not guaranteed, since as the Bible states in
Proverbs 29: 18: ’Where there is no vision, the people perish.’